


Catch Me When I Fall

by BearlyWriting



Series: Bad Things Happen Bingo [19]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Bad Things Happen Bingo, Canon-Typical Violence, Flashbacks, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Injury, Prompt: Nerve Damage, Shiro (Voltron) Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, in a flashback
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-25 17:34:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,733
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22119862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BearlyWriting/pseuds/BearlyWriting
Summary: "For the briefest whisper of time, his fingers brush nothing but air. Then there’s solid metal against his palm as Shiro catches the railing they had plunged over in his hand.They’re falling and then, abruptly, they aren’t."For the prompt "Nerve Damage" for the Bad Things Happen Bingo.
Series: Bad Things Happen Bingo [19]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1271933
Comments: 4
Kudos: 52





	Catch Me When I Fall

The ground drops. There’s the grinding screech of metal-on-metal, a rumble that vibrates all the way through Shiro’s body, reverberating in his chest. There’s one brief, suspended moment, where Shiro catches Hunk’s eyes, wide with the dawning realisation of what’s happening, before the metal platform underneath them lurches to one side.

Shiro drops like a stone, landing hard on the cold metal. Gravity catches at him, greedy fingers digging in and dragging down. For a moment, Shiro fights against it. His prosthetic scrabbles for purchase almost without input from his brain, but it finds none. Shiro slides towards the inky blackness below him, a gaping void waiting to swallow him whole.

Below him, Hunk is sliding too. Shiro catches a glance of his face, his mouth wide and dark with fear, his eyes white. One hand is scrabbling at smooth metal, just as Shiro’s had been and just as uselessly. The other is still clutching Lance close against his side, the Blue Paladin limp and lifeless and utterly unaware of the danger they’re in.

“Hunk!” Shiro yells. The shout is almost lost beneath the awful screech of rending metal, but Hunk tilts his face up towards him anyway.

The drop rises behind Hunk like an open mouth. He’s about to go over - him and Lance, who Hunk, even in his blind terror, hasn’t let go of. Shiro can’t let that happen. The EMP the Galra had set of earlier fried their jet packs as well as their communications. If Hunk falls, neither he nor Lance will make it.

So, instead of fighting against gravity, Shiro let’s it take him. Lifts one leg up to push himself downwards, against all survival instincts, with one, powerful kick. He reaches desperately with his prosthetic. Then he’s practically on top of them, his Galra arm clamping tight around both Hunk and Lance, crushing them against his side. Hunk squeaks in terror before they hit the slanted railing hard, knocking the breath from his lungs and clattering against Shiro’s prosthetic.

Then they’re flying straight over it, launched into vacant space, the only solid ground very, very far below them.

Shiro reaches desperately with the arm not clamped around his friends. For the briefest whisper of time, his fingers brush nothing but air. Then there’s solid metal against his palm as Shiro catches the railing they had plunged over in his hand.

They’re falling and then, abruptly, they aren’t.

The weight of them jerks to a halt at the end of Shiro’s human arm. Something like electricity sparks in his chest, crackling across his ribs, up through his shoulder, all the way to his fingers. It sends a strange spasm through his dangling body. A noise that might be a scream tries to rise through his throat and Shiro only just manages to grind it to bits behind his teeth. Below him, pressed into his chest, Hunk gasps, a tight sound of surprise and pain.

“Are you OK?” Shiro manages, although his voice sounds wrong, even to his own ears.

“Errr...no,” Hunk manages to squeak. His face is pressed into Shiro’s chest, muffling the words. Shiro risks glancing down and is relieved to see him still dangling in Shiro’s grip, one of his arms wrapped tight around Lance, the other clutching at Shiro’s waist. “Do you think you can pull us up?”

“Maybe.”

But even as he says it, Shiro knows he won’t be able to. He’s barely managing to cling on at all. Shiro is strong but the combined weight of Hunk and Lance and his own heavy body is testing even his limit, and he’s painfully aware that he’s holding them up with his very human arm and its very human strength. His chest aches like he’s taken a blow and an awful, burning, electric sort of numbness is racing up and down his arm. He feels paralysed. He’s certain that the only reason they haven’t dropped to their death is because Shiro isn’t entirely sure he _can_ uncurl his fingers. Physically.

But he tries. Straining against the pain and the weight and...nothing happens. The muscles in his arm feel stretched beyond repair, too weak to function. He’s sweating under his armour, slick and sour. His arm trembles.

He can’t tell Hunk that, though. Not while they’re dangling over a deep black void with nothing but Shiro’s grip to save them.

“Shiro-“ Hunk starts. And Shiro isn’t sure if he’s about to call him out on his weakness, or if he has some solution to offer that will get them out of this nightmare, but he doesn’t get to find out because he’s cut off by a sudden jerk, a sharp inhale of breath, then Lance squawking like a frightened bird.

“What the-“

They slip. Lance’s squawk turns into a scream. Shiro clamps his prosthetic so tight around them that it strangles Hunk’s own desperate noise in his chest.

They’re not falling, exactly, but Shiro’s grip is slowly failing and they will be, soon. Shiro tries to readjust, to tighten his grip, but his fingers don’t seem to want to respond. When he glances down again, both Paladins are staring up at him with wide, wet eyes, fear plastered across their faces.

“Pull us up!” Lance gasps, clutching back at Hunk now that he’s conscious enough to do so. Shiro kind of wishes that he hadn’t woken up.

“I can’t,” Shiro admits, through gritted teeth. It costs him to do so, something small and hard rolling loose in his chest. His arm trembles harder and, for a moment, Shiro is worried they’re about to be jarred loose.

“What about Keith and Pidge?” Hunk asks, desperately. “They should be -“

They slip. Shiro’s fingers burn like there’s a fire under his skin, a strange, aching not-sensation. He can barely feel them, but he knows they’re slipping. That his grip is failing. This time, they fall.

There’s one breathless moment of free fall. Then - 

Someone grabs Shiro’s wrist. Shiro’s breath catches in his chest as he jerks to another halt. He opens his eyes. When did he close them? When they fell? When Shiro had, not for the first time in his life, accepted that maybe this was it, the end?

When he glances up, Keith’s face fills the space above him, white and strained, his helmet covering his dark mop of hair, but his visor up. The Red Paladin is pressed flat against the railing, both arms outstretched to catch Shiro as he fell. Behind him, Pidge is clutching at his waist. Both of their jetpacks are whirring against the strain. They hadn’t been hit by the EMP then.

Shiro could weep with relief.

“Hold on,” Keith grits out. “We’re gonna pull you up.”

Slowly, inch by painful inch, Keith and Pidge drag them over the railing. Shiro’s feet scrabble against metal, then they’re dragging them further, both grunting with the effort, until all five of them can collapse onto solid ground again.

Shiro lies flat on his back for longer than he probably should. Beside him, Hunk is pressed into the ground, his lips to the dirt, sobbing quietly in relief. Lance has one arm draped over his friend’s back, the other hand spread out flat beside them. Keith and Pidge are both standing over them, Keith’s brow drawn low with concern, Pidge shifting anxiously from foot-to-foot.

When Shiro finally sits up, he feels dizzy.

“What happened?” Keith asks when Shiro is upright enough to meet his gaze.

“Our jetpacks are fried,” Shiro tells him, and is surprised by how calm he sounds. “Helmets too. I think the Galra set off some kind of EMP. A bomb too, maybe. There was an explosion. It took out the platform we were standing on.”

“Shiro caught us,” Hunk adds, a strange mix of awe and the remnants of fear in his voice. “Otherwise we would have - oh quiznak, I think I’m gonna hurl.”

Lance pats Hunk’s back sympathetically before leaning over to latch onto Shiro’s human arm. A strange sensation jolts through Shiro’s skin beneath his armour: a crackling, electric burn shooting from his elbow to his pinky finger. Lance’s hands feel strangely distant - even accounting for the armour - the same sort of curious sensation as when his leg falls asleep, as if his limb has shrunk inside itself and the flesh around it is only an unfeeling case.

It’s not a sensation he particularly likes and, more than that, it worries him. When he glances down at it, his arm doesn’t look any different from normal, although his fingers are still curled into a strange claw-like shape, his pinky pressed right into his palm.

“Shiro’s beefy muscles saved our butts,” Lance is saying, squeezing at Shiro’s arm. There’s a tremble in his voice that Shiro should be concerned about and his hands are shaking against Shiro’s armour but -

Shiro tries to uncurl his fingers. They don’t move.

Something like panic claws up his throat, huge and painful and heavy. There’s a darkness at the edges of his vision. Claws in his head, in his brain, trying to drag him down as surely as gravity had just a few moments earlier. Shiro fights against it. Tries again to uncurl his fingers - if he can just get them flat - but this time they only twitch a little.

_”Be still, Champion,” Haggar hisses, the words dark tendrils squirming through his skull. “The connection needs to be made correctly.”_

_Shiro turns his head, although he knows he shouldn’t. That awful metal monstrosity lies limp beside him, attached at the mangled stump of what’s left of his arm - his_ arm _, God. The fingers are curled limply, like a spider on its back. When claw-tipped hands close over the metal, he can’t feel it, although it looks as though it should be a part of him._

_“Still,” Haggar hisses again. Nails rake through his hair, that strange white streak that’s coming in at his bangs, then her fingers twist, pressing him against the metal table at his back._

_Shiro struggles, flexing against her grip and the restraints holding him still, but there’s no give. Hands close around his shoulder, still swollen and sore and Shiro cuts a cry of pain off between his teeth. Then: agony. Fire, racing up from some unknown source, spearing through his shoulder, his throat, straight through his brain. Shiro’s screaming. He knows he’s screaming but he can’t stop._

“Shiro?”

Shiro blinks, disoriented. The world around him seems blurry and unreal. Where’s Haggar? Haggar was here and she was hurting him.

There’s pressure at his shoulder - his left one, the one that isn’t grafted to metal and machinery - and Shiro starts but...it doesn’t hurt. No one is hurting him.

“Shiro?” Lance asks again, leaning close. He’s pressed against Shiro’s arm, looking at him with concern. Shiro can barely feel him, and that has another spark of panic throbbing in his throat.

“What?” He manages. It’s Lance, he reminds himself, as the world becomes more real around him. It’s Lance and the other Paladins, crowding close around him. There’s no Haggar here.

“I said we should get going,” Keith says, with a frown. He tilts his head, eyes flickering between Shiro’s curled-up hand, still lying limply on his knee, and his face. “Are you OK?”

Shiro hadn’t actually been screaming then, at least.

“Fine,” he says, too shortly. Keith’s eyes narrow, but he doesn’t push. “You’re right, we should get going. We don’t know what else the Galra might have taken out.”

He heaves himself to his feet, using his prosthetic for leverage. Lance slides away as he does, whining for Hunk to help him to his feet once the Yellow Paladin is standing too.

Now that he’s upright, Shiro can feel how awkwardly he’s holding his arm. It’s not limp, exactly, but stiff, as if he doesn’t quite have control over it. Shiro tries to move it, subtly, and it seems to obey when he rolls his shoulder. When he tries to flex his elbow, though, it resists, and Shiro has given up on his fingers, balled like a fist.

Shiro isn’t stupid. He knows the fall must have damaged it - catching all the weight, stopping so suddenly. It feels like it might be damaged nerves, and Shiro would know what that feels like after all, and the thought almost has his throat sealing up.

The cryo pods will fix it, Shiro tells himself. They’ve fixed worse injuries than a damaged arm. Still, Shiro feels a cold sweat beading on his forehead nonetheless. He can’t be down an arm. He _can’t_. Not after everything. Not while the other Paladins still need him.

“The lions are this way,” Pidge says, snapping Shiro out of that cold fear. There’s a crude sort of map projecting from her armour, a bright little blinking spot marking out the spot where they had left their lions before this mission had gone totally to shit.

Shiro nods. He clears his throat, trying to ensure that his voice is even before he says: “OK, step carefully.”

Pidge takes the lead. The others hang back, obviously waiting for Shiro to take point beside her and Shiro would rather do anything _but_ that because he knows his arm will be obvious to anyone who looks at it for more than a moment, but he doesn’t want to draw attention by hanging back either. So he falls into step beside her, holding his Galra arm at the ready to make up for the fact that his left arm is basically useless.

“It looks like the Galra set some charges further up too,” Pidge mutters, eyes on her hologram rather than her feet. “We’ll have to turn left here.”

Shiro follows her obediently, taking a sharp turn at the next corner, and runs straight into a sentry. There’s a dull thud of flesh against metal, a startled breath from beside him. Then the sound of Pidge drawing her bayard, but Shiro has already lit his prosthetic and buried it into the sentry’s chest.

There are two more behind it. Pidge takes out one of them with minimal effort, then Keith is sliding between them, jostling against Shiro’s numb arm when he fails to move it out of the way, taking out the other with a quick slice.

“Are you alright, Shiro?” He says, tightly, once the sentries are lifeless hunks of metal at their feet.

“I’m fine,” Shiro says again.

“No you’re not,” Pidge interrupts, voice sharp. “What’s wrong with your arm?”

_Nothing’s wrong with my arm,_ Shiro nearly says, but he bites it back before the words slip out. It’s an instinctual reaction to lie to them, to keep them safe from any painful truths. But it’s too late if they’ve already noticed it and it’s a liability that they should be aware of.

Shiro tries to flex it again and winces at the awkward movement. “It’s stiff,” is what he finally says. “I think the nerves are damaged. From the fall probably. It’s basically useless.”

Keith’s face is white. “Nerves damaged?” He asks, voice as stiff as Shiro’s arm.

“That sounds bad,” Lance says from behind them. “That sounds really bad.”

Shiro tries to shrug and regrets it. Truth be told, it isn’t even that bad of an injury. Back on Earth it would be, perhaps. It doesn’t hurt though, really - or, it does, a burning, achy sort of pain that feels as if it’s coming from deep down in his bones - but in the grand scheme of injuries Shiro has sustained it's practically nothing, more numbness than anything. It’s the restriction in his mobility that’s the real problem, but the pods will fix that. They _will_.

“Nothing that the pods can’t fix,” Shiro says tightly. “We just need to get back to the lions.”

“OK,” Keith says. “Come on then. The sooner we get back, the sooner you can get in a pod and get fixed up.”

“They can fix nerve damage, right?” Lance asks, small and frightened.

Shiro sets his jaw and doesn’t reply. That’s the million dollar question, because he doesn’t know. The pods can’t fix everything - they haven’t erased his scars after all, or brought back his arm. But this injury is fresh and it’s not as though he’s lost anything. The pods will work.

They have to.

“Of course they can,” he says, keeping his voice light. 

No one disagrees with him.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, I could not figure out how to end this haha
> 
> I hope you enjoyed :)
> 
> I have a tumblr at [bearly-writing](https://bearly-writing.tumblr.com/) if you fancy dropping by for a chat!


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